Banned in Beirut

In “Beirut Hotel,” Zoha, a Lebanese nightclub singer, and Mathieu, a Frenchman on a business trip who may or may not be a spy, repeatedly get together in Mathieu’s hotel room in Beirut and have raunchy sex. The film, the third feature by the Lebanese director Danielle Arbid, was banned in her home country. The reason: not so much the erotic scenes as one the film’s subplots, which concerns the 2005 assassination of the former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, which is an explosive topic in the country. The Lebanese have only been able to watch the film by satellite (it aired on the cable channel Arte; some one million viewers tuned in), but it’s been making the festival rounds around the world and can be seen in New York today as part of a current series on Arab cinema titled “Orientation: A New Arab Cinema,” at Lincoln Center.

The censors claimed that “the film’s depiction of the political situation would endanger Lebanon’s security.” Since the end of the fifteen-year-long war, in 1990, Lebanese officials have been promoting a dangerous amnesia to the country’s troubles. Artists, especially filmmakers, have been obdurately trying to counter that amnesia by creating works that discuss, confront, and analyze Lebanon’s tempestuous past and present. Many of these filmmakers grew up during the war, left for Europe, and returned in the nineteen-nineties only to endure more wars. Despite political upheavals, and the relative lack of national funding, the Lebanese have continued to make films. Taken together, their works provide a sort of historical documentation of the country—on a political and, more importantly, psychological level.

Arbid’s first feature film, “In the Battlefields,” from 2004, was at the forefront of several movies about growing up in Beirut during wartime in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. (This mini-boom of Lebanese cinema seems to have been sparked by Ziad Doueiri’s “West Beirut,” from 1998, the first Arabic-language film to enjoy general release in the U.S. and the first Lebanese film to overtake the American blockbusters in Lebanese theatres since before anyone can recall.) More recently, many Lebanese films have centered on the aftershocks of the Hariri assassination, which was followed by more political murders, a war between Hezbollah and Israel, and sectarian strife—all of which combined to eradicate a contagious sense of hope that engulfed Lebanon in 1989, when a peace declaration was finally signed between the then warring parties.

“Beirut Hotel” presents a cosmopolitan yet hostile country where citizens and visitors alike are constantly watched and monitored, where news of kidnappings rule the airways, and people are silenced (read: murdered) for political reasons. Dima El-Horr’s “Every Day Is a Holiday,” another Lebanese feature film in the Arab-cinema series at Lincoln Center, also refracts the country’s volatility. Lebanese filmmakers, artists, and curators have been trying hard to reinstate Beirut’s eminence as the cultural center of the Middle East, but the political troubles keep getting in the way. The country has been crippled by an economic crisis and the recent fighting in neighboring Syria isn’t helping to boost foreign investors’ confidence in the country. In recent years, Dubai, of all places, has stepped in to take over this role.

Dubai itself has no history of cinema to speak of; only a handful of films have been made there, and only one of these was released in movie theatres. But since 2004, the emirate has been holding the Dubai International Film Festival, which has become an influential showcase of Arab films and has been providing much-needed funding to Arab filmmakers through the festival’s funding branch, the Dubai Film Market.

The selection of films for the “Orientation” series at Lincoln Center, made by Richard Peña—the center’s exiting director and a champion of Arab cinema—in conjunction with the people behind the Dubai International Film Festival, is fairhanded. Dubai isn’t trying to mold an Arab cinema that adheres to strict moral codes or promotes one religion over another, or even one that presents a sunny picture of the Arab world. The situation in Lebanon, as seen through the lenses of Arbid and El-Horr, is precarious, and the rise of censorhip is an alarming development in a country, which has, for quite a while now, been known as the most progressive and permissive in Arab society. Danielle Arbid has had to battle the Lebanese censors for all three of her feature films. According to the New York Times, following the decree that banned “Beirut Hotel,” the filmmaker “moved to France in disgust.”